Books |
Before and After
Rosellen Brown
By
Published: May 18, 2010
Category:
Fiction
Rather than endure the dreadful and marginally accurate televised news in the morning, I watch a few minutes of a dreadful and fake movie on Lifetime.
Really, you should try it.
Consider the inane plots, the corny dialogue, the teased hair, the excessive cleavage, the constant pouring of red wine…
Don’t you think those unfailing elements of a Lifetime movie would jolt your mind awake and send you into the day in a jolly mood?
Recently, though, I turned Lifetime on at 7:50 AM and saw this:
“You want to jump in the trenches with me? You better muscle up.” What a line! And slammed at Meryl Streep, no less.
The movie is Before and After, starring Streep, Liam Neeson, Edward Furlong and, as the defense lawyer, Alfred Molina. It’s much classier than the usual Lifetime fare. And it’s adapted from a classy novel, Rosellen Brown’s Before and After.
Why was it on Lifetime?
Because of the situation.
In the movie, as in the novel, Carolyn and Ben Reiser are city people — she’s a doctor, he’s a sculptor — who have moved to New Hampshire to raise their children in a decent, healthy climate. They’re latte-drinking, Volvo-driving progressives. You know the story: accepted in their small town, but not widely understood or loved.
The Reisers have two kids — a boy and a girl — and a charmingly normal life. They’re not as banal as the family in Anna Quindlen’s Every Last One, but not for lack of trying. Naturally, the fabric of their lives will be torn — “forever,” as they say in the promos — by a terrible event that pits them against one another, against the town and the justice system.
That event is the death of the girlfriend of their 17-year-old son, Jacob. During an argument in a snowy field, she grabs the jack from the car and swings at him and almost takes his head off, and rage takes over from there — the 120-pound boy tries to slug her, and she falls, and her head lands right on the sharp edge of the jack, and there she is, her life bleeding out into the snow.
It’s an accident, you say. Come forward. Tell the truth.
Yes, that’s what you say now. But what would you say if your kid accidentally killed someone and then he fled and when you went out into your garage you found the blood-covered weapon?
See? It’s a little more complicated than you thought.
Rosellen Brown is a master at asking questions with no easy answers. Here, it’s this: “How do you think you know your son? Up to a certain age, everything he does is visible to you. And gradually he walks away…”
I read this book with my heart in my throat, ready to scream at pretty much everyone. Because once you don’t do the “right” thing — and really, so few ever do — you’re in a world much like the real one. Shifting alliances. Midnight freakouts. Nagging consciences. And, of course, the justice machine.
“Before and After” is a thriller on several levels. And then it’s a little better than a thriller.
